.. or thinking it a step further: Onboard flash as primary storage and an additional slot for exchange?

I think it still has to be a IDE base flash storage.. Cannot easily use a dedicated flash IC as you have to erase a whole sector to write to it.. It is okay for things like ROM as once flashed the data does not generally change. Cannot easily use flash storage for things like hard drives

I think it still has to be a IDE base flash storage.. Cannot easily use a dedicated flash IC as you have to erase a whole sector to write to it.. It is okay for things like ROM as once flashed the data does not generally change. Cannot easily use flash storage for things like hard drives

Thought so... really was only a shot in the dark

But like many others, I am a little frustrated about the quality decline of flash storage, be it CF or SD. Seems to get increasingly harder to find working flash storage for a number of devices lately... I have a whole box of non working CF cards for example.

I have 128MB transcend IDE Flash, bought some 12 years ago - still operational. May be that those modules are better choice, and that ATA timing is better for our oldies. Someone should try them Need to look who sells it online ...
With CF cards, I say usually: Sandisk is best choice. May be costing more, of course. Other problem is lot of crap, forged brand cards, etc. on market.

There are other solutions like IDE to CF or IDE to USB etc. you can buy these adapters pretty cheap. I use a SD to IDE card in my Falcon and it worked really well.. Ultimately in my hardware I will likely replace IDE port with IDE to USB bridge IC.. This is what terrible fire is doing.. I think USB sticks would be good choice to go for and ultimately forget CF cards..

There are other solutions like IDE to CF or IDE to USB etc. you can buy these adapters pretty cheap. I use a SD to IDE card in my Falcon and it worked really well.. Ultimately in my hardware I will likely replace IDE port with IDE to USB bridge IC.. This is what terrible fire is doing.. I think USB sticks would be good choice to go for and ultimately forget CF cards..

Uh – but USB for our beloved old 68000s is a hard burden. USB before USB 3.0 with UASP ("USB attached SCSI protocol", in the end "SCSI-over-USB-cables") extension is rather a headache for mass storage. The CPU needs to poll all the time, and that’s quite stressful with only 8 oder 16 MHz.

And the quality of USB thumb drives is no better than CF or SD in general. You get crap when you buy cheap, and proper stuff costs money.

The guys who created "Lightning VME", an USB adapter for the internal VME slot in the MegaSTE and TT (not blocking the 'outer' VME slot!), managed to get about 680 KB/s with USB mass storage, with SingleTOS. With IDE (Thunder + Storm) in the same machine, same driver, they get about 5500 KB/s. 'nuff said.

IDE-SD solution may be currently the cheapest one. I use it in Falcon, and works fine.

I did not use IDE to USB, but somehow I don't think that it should need CPU assistance at all on ST side. I mean, adapter self should do the polling - if adapter is made wisely.
That 5500 KB/sec is of course on TT. But I have no clue what is that Thunder + Storm adapter. VME seems for me as not really good place today.
For instance, you need some extra HW mod for regular IDE, since VME address space covers not regular Atari IDE address range (at least according to Popsel, who dealt with it on Mega STE) .
Low speed of VME-USB in that case means not that that way is automatically slow. It may be just not good realization. Like Satandisk on ACSI - 150 KB/sec.
I'm not for USB on old Ataris. SD cards are cheap too.

thunder + storm is a IDE plus fast RAM card I think.. But it's possible that solution with hard drive may be into fast-ram not ST-RAM. I have asked the creator to look at this thread and explains more details ..

i am one of the Hardware developer of the Thunder Storm and Lightnung USB Card.

Some Informations:

Thunder:
Falcon Compatible IDE Interface for the Atari TT
Feature: Falcon Compatible, pure Byteswap, Smartswap (only the Data is swappt, not the Controll Register (HDDriver Compatible) )
We reacht upto 6Mb/s in Stock TT, with my Boosted TT i get 7,4MB/s (only reachable when the driver is loaded into fastram (hddriver has a special setting for it)

On Atari TT wie reached a datatransfer speed of 670Kbyte/s and with Mega STE we reached 320kbyte/s (USB Stick)

Maybe its also possible to make a solution for normal ST....

The biggest problem ist that the CPU isnt fast enough to prepare the packages. The USB Chip wants prepared data packages with a package size of 256-1023bytes. So the performance is limited by the CPU speed..